The Central Coast is facing one of the worst medical professional crises in California. Despite the region spanning from Santa Cruz to Ventura county, it has only two hospital residency programs. 

For many UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) students, a scarcity in medical facilities means having to leave Santa Cruz for urgent care. Oftentimes, primary care appointments in the county are booked out for months. 

Mara Reilly, a fourth-year global and community health major, has lived in Santa Cruz for her whole life. She has experienced medical inaccessibility firsthand as a volunteer for Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center of Santa Cruz. 

“Any complicated pregnancies at all would just get shipped up to Stanford, because they just did not have the facilities or the staff to accommodate difficult things,” Reilly said. “Which is not really what you want to hear when you’re giving birth.”

Problems like these partly stem from a lack of accessible medical education. Sixty percent of California residents must leave the state for healthcare training, and studies have shown that most physicians practice within 100 miles of where they earned their degree. 

To combat this shortage, UCSC is beginning to explore pathways toward establishing a medical school, after creating the global and community health undergraduate major in 2022 and a pre-medical post-baccalaureate program in 2024. The latest of these steps is a partnership with UC Davis called PRIME Central Coast.

PRIME Central Coast will be a part of the University of California’s (UC) statewide Programs in Medical Education, which complement standard medical curriculum with training tailored toward California’s underserved regions. 

The program is geared toward students from the Central Coast, with the goal of creating more opportunities for aspiring medical professionals to practice in a region they feel connected to.

Students will spend two years at UC Davis’ medical school, then complete their clinical rotations at facilities in the Central Coast. The program is currently in the process of partnering with local medical clinics to host clerkships and will begin to accept admissions in spring 2026, enrolling students in 2027. 

The opportunity that PRIME Central Coast provides for UCSC students to pursue medical education in the region is especially meaningful to local students like Elana McGrew, who is a third-year molecular cell and developmental biology major.

“I would be very excited to be in that program, stay in California, and then I can come back to Santa Cruz,” McGrew said. “This is where I’ve grown up, all my friends and family are here.”

Dr. Deepthi Nair, the director of UCSC’s pre-medical post-baccalaureate program, stated that the program is one way to increase the retention rate of medical students.

“Research has definitely shown us that, if physicians belong to a certain area, they have their family roots there, they are more inclined to come back and practice in the same area,” Dr. Nair said. “That is one huge way of addressing the shortage of physicians.”

Providing medical services to the largely farmworker and immigrant communities of the central coast offers unique challenges. PRIME Central Coast looks to equip students local to the area with the skills to address these issues. 

Dr. Nair feels that for patients in particular, feeling comfortable with a healthcare professional is a big aspect.

“More and more patients would be inclined to have their routine visits if they feel comfortable with the physician,” Nair said. “They speak their own language, they look like them, they speak like them. That is going to make a huge difference in people coming to physicians and taking care of themselves.”

For the launch of PRIME Central Coast, California Senator John Laird included $1.5 million from the state budget to fund the first five years of the program. 

Grant Hartzog, the executive faculty director of the global and community health program and the leading faculty for PRIME Central Coast, described the program’s financial state.

“We’ve got a pretty detailed budget … It’s pretty tight, but it should carry us through 2030. One thing to keep in mind, we got five years worth of money, but the first student doesn’t actually start medical school till 2027,” Hartzog said. 

As of the publication date, the program has not set a tuition amount yet. The PRIME Central Coast team is still discussing a plan to permanently allocate state funds. 

The PRIME program will scale up to a full-fledged school of medicine, starting with six people and scaling up year-by-year. UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive has been open about this goal.

Already, pathways are forming between PRIME and current programs to funnel students. Dr. Nair envisions a pipeline from the post-baccalaureate program to UC PRIME Central Coast. 

When Dr. Nair began her work at UCSC, she expressed her excitement about the prospect of a medical school. 

“You can always dream, right? I mean, that’s how it starts,” Dr. Nair said. “Our chancellor has been so amazing. She’s been so supportive of everything that we have done so far. I’m a hundred percent sure this is going to come into fruition soon.”